Ahmad Awais
In the spirit of regular core contribution to the WordPress core, I have again contributed to WordPress 4.8. It’s a different kind of proud feeling you get when you give back. But most of all, I am happy because of my incredible wife — Maedah Batool — who also got props, her first core contribution.
🎉 TheDevCouple is now WordPress Core Contributor!
🤔 My involvement in the WordPress community is growing by every passing day. I consider it my family. I have made so many awesome friends here. This year so far, I have contributed about 40% to 50% of my entire productive time to FOSS — free and open source software! — especially WordPress.
🎯 On a WordPress meetup I arranged last month, a developer asked me — what’s the catch? Why do you contribute, or code for free? I told him, that it’s not really free. I get a lot back from it. It’s my investment in the WordPress community — I am investing in WordPress, so that one day, the community will invest back in me.
✨ Honestly, though, I spend a lot of my time to improve WordPress and its community. Either by contributing code to the core, producing free and open source packages on GitHub (— latest few are WPSass, WPAutoPot, WP-Salts-Update-CLI, Sendy-PHP-API — and more in the Labs Project).
🤓 It’s not always easy you know! Though, it may seem like it. You have to spend time on it. It costs you. It’s harder when you are self-employed. Though, it’s rewarding in many ways! But it still is a labor of love. WordPress will change your life if you let it.
This release was led by Matt and Jeff Paul, with the help of the following fabulous folks. There are 346 contributors with props in this release, with 106 of them contributing for the first time.
WordPress 4.8 adds more ways for you to express yourself and represent your brand. An Update with You in Mind!
Though some updates seem minor, they’ve been built by hundreds of contributors with you in mind. Get ready for new features you’ll welcome like an old friend: link improvements, three new media widgets covering images, audio, and video, an updated text widget that supports visual editing, and an upgraded news section in your dashboard which brings in nearby and upcoming WordPress events.
Version 4.8 of WordPress, named “Evans” in honor of jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.8 add more ways for you to express yourself and represent your brand.
With WordPress 4.8 you get exciting new default widgets — through which you can share images, videos, audio, and even write rich text. I think the image below will help you get an idea about all the new widgets.
Editing the links in WordPress editor has always been a bit clunky. With link boundaries, it’s all new and smooth. When you edit a link, you’ll see a blue background to help you understand if you are editing a link or adding text before/after that. Just watch the GIF below.
Now, you can check if there are any events happening near you. You can update the location and you’ll get the feed from WordPress meetups and WordCamps. eing part of the community can help you improve your WordPress skills and network with people you wouldn’t otherwise meet.
Here are a few links to what’s new in WordPress 4.8. If you are a developer, don’t forget to check out the WordPress 4.8 Field Guide — Jeff did an incredible job with that post.
Founder & CEO at Langbase.com · Ex VP DevRel Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork
🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 🏆 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).
🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide ⓦ WordPress Core Developer 📣 TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.
✨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
🙌 Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade 💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.
👋… Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais
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Congrats Ahmad and Maedah! You guys literally make us all jealous 😒 This is such an achievement. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
It would be interesting to know more in detail about your contributions to 4.8 though. 😍
Thanks, Aravind!
My laptop’s charger died today, right after the release, I had limited time to write the post. Currently, on mobile :) You can understand that. I did write about the contributions in details last time for 4.7. This time, it was about Customizer’s inline docs improvement, a few fixes here and there, and default theme bundling.
We are proud of you ahmad you are representing Pakistan and telling the world that we are a peaceful and talented nation.hatts of to you for your work may ALlah bless with all the happiness and give you many more .
That’s very kind of you to say! 💯